


Of Leviathans and Tea

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-22
Packaged: 2017-11-19 04:38:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t think it was very smart of you to appear to an old sailor while looking like half a boy. Mr. Outsider. Sir.” Nights out at sea can be lonely for Samuel, except for when a god shows up and asks for a drink. (Now with art!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to alearius on Tumblr for the fantastic art of this fic! See it [here](http://alearius.tumblr.com/post/42176933026).

The sound of water lapping against the hull of the boat is soft and soothing. The nights, these days, are quiet. The city is at peace. The seas are as well, at least at the moment. It's very late at night and the lights of Dunwall are a glittering blur of shoreline, and the stars glitter on the slick mirrored surface of the sea, and Samuel is perfectly content to just sit and take it in.

He is not stupid enough to try and sleep out here, alone in a small boat on the wide ocean - but he would like to. Everything is simpler at sea. Words like _conspiracy_ and _loyalist_ and _lost love_ do not make much sense when the only voices around you are those of salt and wind and sky.

Though it's not that he doesn't get lonely, sometimes. Quietly so.

He's taken Corvo out here a few times, now that there are no missions circumscribing their trips and no murder at the end - just the two of them, sometimes with a bottle of whiskey, Samuel talking of nothings and Corvo sometimes appreciating the gaps and the silence and sometimes filling in with little nothing-observations of his own. It is a very comfortable sort of friendship. The Lord Protector is a good listener. He seems to like the way Samuel can spin harmless little stories that settle around them both like a blanket.

They do not talk much of politics, certainly not anymore, not when Corvo lives and breathes it every day and already has far too much tension in his shoulders. They do not talk, much, of the past. They have raised a toast to the men the Loyalists _used to be_ , and that was _enough_. Samuel went to sea to forget, after all, and he supposes that he can lend Corvo the same favor.

And besides – he decided long ago that there were things he was simply _not meant to know_.

No. If Samuel does not ask about the mark on his hand, or the particulars of the hellish trek back from death and the Flooded District and meeting the Empress’s killer, or the nightmares he knows the man has of falling though an endless void of the words YOU CANNOT SAVE HER - just as Corvo does not ask about the name of his boat - it is not because he does not expect answers to come. It is not because either of them would mind telling. It is simply _trust_. It is because they are both men who know to sit and appreciate the silence and the turn of the waves and the wide peaceful expanse of the sea.

And the sea is so calm, now. Barely a sound against the boat's grey hull. Barely a ripple on the surface. The water is silk-smooth, mirrorlike. Samuel peers down and watches shapes move underneath his reflection, so many fathoms down below, dark and vast and slow. A great bulk of something silver passes by below him. It is so many hundred times larger than his little boat. In the moonlight it seems to shine, and Samuel draws his coat around himself.

There are things in the deep that have no name, and he is only an old sailor who is without friends (but not friendless) alone on the water. If something wished to swallow him whole, it would. There is nothing he can do, and so he does not worry.

And besides. The night is very beautiful.

It is late, but sleep and shore are a long ways off. Samuel fusses underneath his seat for a mug and a thermos of still-warm tea. The boat _tips_ , just a bit, as he does so; and the mug rolls out of his grasp and rolls down the length of the boat, stopping at the bow with a soft _clink_.

Bent down, Samuel watches a hand reach down and pick it up.

“Do you mind?” asks the young man from his teetering perch on the bow of the boat. He is sopping wet, dark hair sleek and plastered to his skull, dripping water all over the boat; he should be shivering but he isn’t, not at all. His eyes are fathomless and dark. He holds the mug forward to be filled. “You’ve got a second one. I’ve never had tea.”

Samuel stares at him for a long, long moment. And then he straightens, very slowly.

“No,” he says, carefully, “if you’re who I think you are, I suppose you haven’t.” He clears his throat. “There’s, uh, a bottle of whiskey too if you’d rather –”

“No, no, tea is fine. Water flavored with the ghosts of faraway leaves. You humans come up with such odd things.” His lips twitch. “Don’t be so afraid of me, Samuel Beechworth. I am more than some ravenous being from the deep who wishes to eat you alive. And you are so much more than some old sailor.”

“I’m not too sure about that,” Samuel manages.

He does not pour the tea.

(Of course the Outsider’s been reading his mind. Of _course_.)

And the Outsider’s eyes are studying his face so intently, and he cannot read if the glitter in them is cruelty or laughter. “No,” he says, and the words are almost _warm_. “You are _essential_. You know the waters of the city like you know the lifelines on your palm, and there is power in that. Much. And you know me already, Samuel Beechworth, whether you are aware of it or not; for you know all my currents and all my dark places.”

Samuel finds that he’s staring again. He clears his throat and searches around for the first words he can find. “You’re the one making all the lights on the river at night, aren’t you? The faces.”

“I am.”

“You scare a lot of people with that.” He sits there for another long moment. “What do you want?”

The Outsider takes the thermos from Samuel’s dumfounded hand, and pours himself a mug of tea that steams in the night air, flicks the tip of his tongue out to taste it. “I only wanted,” he answers, “to greet you properly, at long last. To thank you.”

Samuel cannot help himself; he laughs, a short and genuine sound. “Why? What for? Should I feel threatened?”

“Oh, no. As I said, you are essential. I mark those who I wish to set the game in motion, but nothing could be _done_ without men such as you. You do not have the same sort of draw as Corvo, for example, but that does not mean you are _lesser_.” A faint flicker of a smile over the rim of his mug. “After all. What could Corvo have done, alone, without you to guide him there?”

Samuel folds his hands in his lap. The Outsider’s tone _pulls_ at him, like the barbs in the backwards-curve of a fishhook, scraping and catching and not quite letting go. He takes the thermos back from the man, considers the second mug for tea, sets it aside. Rubs a hand over his chin. “Is that how you see him?”

“Hm?”

“Corvo. Or whoever you’ve shown favor to. You said _game_ , seems to me you don’t really think of those men as…well. Men.”

The Outsider tilts his head, briefly, considering. It is clear that he does not quite care. “ _Game_ is too simple a word, perhaps.”

“You know, there’s a lot of reasons that Corvo and me don’t talk about politics in this boat.” Samuel is only a little surprised at himself; if this being wishes to swallow him whole, after all, there’s not much he can do either way. His voice rises a bit. “It’s not my place to go asking about that stuff, sure. But we don’t like all the fancy double-talk those aristocrats use. You can dress it up all you like, but at the end of the day it all still smells the same.”

The young man’s lips twitch; on another being, it would be a smile. “Are you _angry_ with me?”

“No.” Samuel shrugs. “A little.”

“Your thoughts are turning so quickly towards teeth and shadows and breaking waves. How interesting. I’m not going to _eat_ you. I am not so cruel.” He sets the mug on the floor and stands, tipping the little boat dangerously so that water licks over one edge and so that Samuel has to scrabble for balance. “Goodbye, Samuel Beechworth. Thank you for the tea.”

“No,” says Samuel. Flat and firm. “ _Sit_.”

The Outsider blinks at him. Startled. His grin is white in the dark. “You would –”

“Don’t give me that look.” Samuel crosses his arms. “Sit.” Hint of a smile. “I don’t think it was very smart of you to appear to an old sailor while looking like half a boy. Mr. Outsider. Sir.”

And the Outsider (in the second most surprising thing of the night, the first being the words Samuel has just spoken), sits. Perched on the prow, knees drawn up, eyebrows raised in expectation.

Samuel pours the tea.

“You just said you weren’t cruel,” he begins. His words are calm and carefully chosen, as always. “And you’ll forgive me, but I worked for Havelock and his snakes. And that’s one of the biggest lies I’ve ever heard.”

“So you _know_ me, then.”

“I know that Corvo’s half-convinced the Abbey’s going to brand him as a witch. I know the poor man can’t sleep with whatever nightmares you put him through. Sleeping and otherwise.” He shifts, feet knocking hollow against the hull of the boat. “He said you’d _chosen_ the man who killed the Empress, too. Daud or whatever his name was. He was another one of your little…” he grimaces at the word. “Game-pieces, or whatever you want to call them.”

The Outsider gives a long and eloquent sigh. “It’s all _much_ more interesting and complicated than –“

“You gave your magic to the man who killed the Empress, yeah? And that’s just one thing you’ve done. That I know about.”

The being sitting on the prow of his boat and wearing the skin of a young man merely looks at him, and his eyes are blank, and the water runs down and over his skin in a map that Samuel cannot hope to read. Or care to. He does not answer.

“Seems to me,” says Samuel, flat, “that you’re responsible for a lot of the horrible things wrong with this city.”

“Also for fixing them, then,” he responds lightly. “With Corvo.”

“Poor man.”

“Poor man,” the Outsider agrees.

“Not much of a fix for all the misery you caused at all.”

“Oh, not at all. He was never intended as a fix.”

Samuel gives a little snort and looks away. He sips his tea. It is no longer quite warm. It is oversteeped and tastes perfectly ordinary and familiar, which is not something that can be said for the rest of this situation.

He sips his tea, and the Outsider sips his, and the stars shine in the sky and the waves lap against the hull of the boat, and the things that move in the deep are unknowable and beautiful and horrible and far below.

“Is that your judgment?” murmurs the Outsider after several moments of silence, when the tea has long since gone perfectly cold. “Have you marked me with your own brand, then? That I am cruel, and callous, and cold, and all those things your Abbey speaks of?”

“Oh, no.” Samuel sets down the mug, rubs a hand over his mouth. “Like you said. I don’t know you and I don’t ever want to, frankly. I’m just going off what I see. And it seems awfully rude of me to say only bad things about some god who shows up in my boat, when I’m only an old sailor.”

The Outsider’s eyes turn up at the corners, just slightly. “Ah, Samuel. You will never quite believe it, but you are _so_ much more than that.”

“Heh. If you say so.” He looks up, catches a black eye with is own. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, Sir – you are the most childish, selfish, _bratty_ young man I’ve ever had in this boat.”

And that young man gives a wide and white and blazing smile in the dark. He laughs, just once, soft as he moves forward, wobbling the boat once more. Before Samuel can think to react he finds that there are arms wrapped around him, thin and smelling of seaweed or ozone and faintly damp – the Outsider gives him a brief, tight hug that he can feel all down to his bones.

And then the boat tips and rights itself with a slosh of water. And Samuel is alone.

For a long while he can only sit there, utterly stunned. And then he begins to laugh, quiet and first and dry; and then loud and genuine peals of laughter that ring out over the empty water and make it a little less empty than before. And when he looks over the side of the boat, he can see a creature moving in the deep below all in shades of silver and blue and empty-eye black; and when he pours himself a final cup of tea (still laughing) he finds that it is steaming hot once more, that it stays that way as he sets his course for shore.


	2. Chapter 2

“It all turns out all right in the end,” comes a voice from somewhere _under_ the hull of the boat. “I still don’t see what you’re so bothered about.”

Samuel rubs at his eyes and blinks rapidly. It’s been a month or two since the Outsider had first appeared, and he’s still not sure if he’d been dreaming or not. He’s not sure which one he hopes for, though it’s probably the latter – falling asleep alone at sea is _dangerous_. He shakes his head a few times to make sure he’s awake, and to make sure the young man who’s appeared across the boat from him isn’t a hallucination.

He doesn’t seem to be.

“Here,” the Outsider murmurs. He reaches across and under Samuel’s seat for the thermos and mugs. They look very odd in his hands, light bending around the cracked handle of one mug in strange ways so that for a moment it doesn’t look like an object that should exist. The Outsider concentrates very intently on pouring. It looks as if he’s as unused to the look of solid things in his hands as Samuel. He passes a mug back to the other man and then leans forward, looking him in the eye. “Are you all right?”

“…Am I dreaming?”

“I don’t believe so, no. Does it matter?”

“Probably not.” Samuel focuses on the sound of the sea against the boat, the smooth warmth of the mug in his hand, things that are solid and real. Sips the tea. That’s real too. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“It all turns out fine for you humans, in the end.” The Outsider shrugs a single thin shoulder. “There were so many futures where the sea rushed in and ate your Empire’s bones. It would have swept away even you. But it did not, because _I_ chose a man who turned out to be more interesting than I even I had thought. You can hardly blame me for the plague and the Empress’s assassination ruining this city. It has turned out well enough for you.”

“…You just implied that you caused the plague, didn’t you.”

The Outsider says nothing, sips his tea.

Samuel gives a sigh that is half a groan as he rubs at the bridge of his nose. “Outsider’s –“ He catches himself with a laugh. “ _Your_ eyes, I suppose. Heh.” He turns the being’s words over in his mind a few times, chews on them. “That’s a horrible excuse, you know that? You sound like a little boy who’s trying to get out of trouble after he broke his dad’s pocketwatch, so he says it’s all better because he stuffed the gears back inside so it looked fine from the outside.” He pulls a face. “Or something like that. I’m not too good with metaphors.”

“No, no,” says the Outsider quickly. He’s watching Samuel quite intently. “That was fine.”

There is a stretch of silence, then, as the water kisses the hull of the boat.

“My point is,” says Samuel, finally, “you’re still a bit of a right bastard. And -” He rubs at the back of his neck. _Outsider’s Eyes_ is there again on his tongue but it would be stupid to say it now, surely. He takes a slow breath. “And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you look young enough, so here goes. If you were my son I’d probably turn you out of the house and make you get a proper job for a while so you can stop thinking you’re the center of everything for a change.”

When the Outsider chuckles, soft, it’s echoed inside the ceramic world of his mug. “Not even Corvo dares say things like this to me.”

“Corvo’s smarter than me, then.”

“Or not. Younger, only. Don’t apologize.” The words have such _relish_ in them. It’s making the hair stand up on the back of Samuel’s neck, just a bit. He watches the Outsider grin at his own reflection in his mug, and he doesn’t move very much. “Your point is a good one, though,” the young man murmurs. “Though limited. Your perspective is only human.”

“Well,” Samuel concedes, “sure.”

“I _am_ the center of everything. There are, as you’ve thought yourself, so many things that stir just below the surface. You cannot know me. You humans cannot even begin to plumb the depths of the sea. I _am_ the sea.”

And _the sea_ looks so secure and perfectly pleased with himself, sitting there with his thin knees almost touching Samuel’s own and quietly dripping saltwater all over the boat. Samuel’s nose wrinkles a bit. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but you said it yourself last time. I _know_ the sea. And I know that that means you’re just more of a bratty little bastard.”

The Outsider hums under his breath, a low agreeable note rather like whalesong. “Fair enough.”

And so they just sit there for a while, appreciating the warmth and the bitter and the sweet of the oversteeped tea and the unthreatening silence of the ocean all around them.

Samuel is good at storytelling, though, and he knows that all silences have to be broken before they stretch too long and become awkward. He casts around for a way to do so. Deep existential questions seem beside the _point_ when the being before him is so blessedly quiet and physically there (even though he seems to be doing odd things to the shadows around him), and so Samuel mulls his words over in his mind a while before he speaks. “If you’re the sea,” he says, “I’m almost surprised you didn’t appear as a woman. You know the things sailors say.”

The Outsider shrugs again. “I didn’t think you would appreciate it.”

Samuel nods, once. He came to sea to _forget_ ; dwelling on the knowledge and implication behind the being’s words would be _remembering_ , and so all he says is “thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another stretch of silence, then, long and easy and agreeable. The Outsider is watching him under his lashes. His eyes keep sliding away toward the stars and the shimmering lights of the city in the distance, but sure as the tide they keep sliding _back_. And there is such constant, mild curiosity on his face. And Samuel _knows_ that the Outsider is not human – that he holds the mug as one unused to such solid things, that he sits too still, that he does not blink or look away or move as men will do – and in some ways this is horrifying and in some ways it is impossible to believe, when his frame sits so slight just on the other side of Samuel’s boat in the shape of a young man.

Samuel is a sailor. He has a healthy respect and fear for the sea. It is hard to remember this when _the sea_ is blinking down in surprise at the empty bottom of his mug.

Perhaps this is what makes him say what comes next.

“You know,” Samuel murmurs, and there is a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, “if you wanted me to properly respect you or fear you or whatever creatures like you warrant, you could have shown up as a whale or something.”

The Outsider looks up, and his expression is so _thoughtful._

And then –

_“GAH!”_

Samuel’s mug goes flying and slopping tea all over his leg when he jerks and scrabbles back from the young man on the other side of the boat. Because the man is suddenly very much _not_ a man at all –  is suddenly _smiling_ at him with a mouth gone wide and crammed with long and curving teeth like those of an anglerfish, with eyes gone huge and black and luminous as the shadows coalesce and cluster around him in shapes like tentacles or wide and curving fins –

\- And then the Outsider is just a young man again, chuckling softly. The shadows drop back into place. The water that murmurs around them only makes its usual sound. Samuel sits frozen, staring at him, as his heart slowly stutters its way back down to normal and the Outsider continues to study him and the night and the empty bottom of his mug as if nothing has passed at all.

Slowly, Samuel takes a deep breath. Slowly, he dabs at the spilled tea on his trousers with the hem of his scarf. He keeps half an eye on the Outsider as he does so, but the being does not seem concerned. He does not seem very keen, Samuel decides, on devouring him.

And so, slowly, he reaches back underneath the seat for the thermos and unstoppers it. Clears his throat. “More tea?”


	3. Chapter 3

Samuel tries not too think too much of it.

There are no more nighttime visits out on the water, no tea, no glittering dark eyes that watch him under lashes. Two months go by, and then three. Then more. The Outsider does not return.

Not, at least, in any way that Samuel can put a finger on.

It begins with a prickle on the back of his neck late at night, when the sea is slate grey and the air rumbles with the premonition of a storm. The waves are growing large and rough and Samuel is sailing back toward shore. It is a bad night to be at sea. He’s in the mouth of the Wrenhaven in the shadow of larger ships, and the water here is shallow; but the waves are high and there’s a worrisome pool of water around Samuel’s feet. It’s not yet coming in faster than he can bail it out, but –

He stops, arms outstretched, water from the bucket splashing and pattering down on the surface of the sea, as the hair on the back of his neck stands up as if the impending lightning has reached down to kiss it. The water under the waves is very, very dark. For a moment, he swears, it is the exact shade and depth and _brilliance_ as a young man’s black eyes.

He tries not to think about it too much. He makes it to shore, and he does not sink. And if the waves cease coming quite so high and filling the boat with water it is luck, only. Samuel is a great believer in luck. All sailors are.

The prickle on the back of his neck does not go away, though, and neither does the feeling of being _watched_.

And he is a great believer in luck, yes, but he has a run of very _good_ luck now: river krusts that spit at him while just slightly out of range, a guardsman who’d been too intent on his drink to look up when his boat sailed by so loud and so long after curfew, a storm that did not break until the very second his feet touched shore. The Outsider does not appear. The second mug in the bottom of his boat goes untouched. But there are nights when Samuel can lean over the side and see shapes moving far below, silver and strange, echoes of the great sweeping fins or luminous eyes that had appeared to him those months ago.

One night, alone, when no one is around to make fun of an old sailor talking to himself, Samuel asks “hello?”

The sea makes no reply.

He is not sure if he is disappointed or _relieved_. He’s very worried that it feels like the former.

And then there is a night when the sea is out of sight, and the lights of the pub in the Hound Pits are warm and amber instead of the dark and the blue of the night sky. The beer in his glass is warm and amber, as well. Samuel is spinning out tales for Cecelia and Geoff Curnow and a few of the other regulars who are here, and the air is close with laughter. If the sea offers him an easy sort of solitude and forgetting, this is an easy sort of _friendship_. He finds himself smiling more than he has in a week; finds himself wondering, a bit, why he stays away so much from this, from shore, from the comfort of a roof over his head and people all around him. The hour grows late. Samuel forgets how many times Cecelia has taken his glass and returned it full. He forgets the sound of silence.

At least, until he looks up in the middle of some off-color joke about the Overseers and finds a young man looking back from a booth at the other end of the pub.

“I didn’t expect to see you somewhere like this,” he murmurs a while later, when he slides into the other side of the booth. The motion unbalances him a bit. The room sways around him. Samuel doesn’t really mind; there are more important things, and somehow he doubts that the Outsider will let others notice or care about an old man talking to nothing in the dark corner of a pub.

For his part, the Outsider only shrugs. His arms are crossed. He refuses the glass that Samuel slides across the table.

“I wanted to see what you were like on land,” he says. “You move differently. Your body does not seem entirely comfortable with the closeness around you, even if your smiles come easier and the words you speak are full of warmth.” The corner of his mouth curves upward. “It is all so very interesting.”

And Samuel is quite suddenly alone in the booth, just the chill of a glass in his hand and an uneasy chill down the nape of his neck. Cecelia comes over and lays a hand on his shoulder and mentions that there are beds upstairs, if he’s feeling the need to be a little more horizontal. Samuel is not entirely sure how he answers her. His mind keeps worrying at the word _interesting_ like a loose tooth or a hole in his pocket. _Interesting_. It had come out of the Outsider’s mouth so smoothly.

There is no defense against lightning while in a metal boat far at sea; but still, the best defense is to lie low and not attract attention. It does no good to have a storm _interested_ in you. Samuel rubs at the back of his neck, feeling the sensation of _being watched_ prickle and stay there like a fishhook caught just under his skin.

*****

The next time Samuel comes to the Hound Pits there is a different dark-eyed man in a shadowy booth in the back; but this is ordinary. As long as Samuel has known him, Corvo has never been one for crowds. Never one for the light. Samuel is not entirely sure if the man has always been like this, has _always_ stayed in the shadows and put himself at such a nervous angle where he can see the whole room and where no one can get behind him. But it is not, after all, his place to ask. There are some things that it’s not his place to know.

And he has _bigger_ questions.

Corvo smiles at him and clasps his hand across the table when Samuel takes his seat, and it seems to light the little corner. “You wouldn’t _believe_ the looks some of the nobility gave me when they learned this was where I’d been coming,” he says, words laced with laughter. “They figured out this place is too good for them. How’ve you been?”

The usual _good, don’t worry about me, you?_ withers on Samuel’s tongue. “Been better.”

“What’s wrong?”

Corvo’s eyes are drawn together and the concern on his face is genuine, real, and Samuel can see him studying him across the table and trying to figure out if whatever worries Cecelia has doubtless told him ( _spends too long at sea, lonely, afraid one day he won’t come back_ ) are true. Samuel stops him when he goes to wave for drinks. He fishes in his pocket for the motor-key to his boat and sets it on the battered table between them with a _click_ ; and for now, that is an answer of its own.

*****

They talk of normal and casual things until they are far out sea where no one else can hear. And then when the lights of the city are only a blur in the distance, Samuel cuts the motor and begins to speak. As ever; but the story he weaves this time does not quite settle around them like a blanket, is looser and colder and more like the chilly drape of a fisherman’s net. He finds himself worrying at one of his tea mugs as he speaks, running his fingers over and through the handle. Remembering the way it had not quite sat well in the Outsider’s hands.

“So,” he finally trails off, weariness in his voice, “is he like this with you?”

Corvo’s gaze, at first, had been dark and intent. Disturbingly so; it had reminded Samuel rather too much of the last man to sit across from him in this boat. As Samuel had gone on, as the word _interesting_ hung in the air between them, he’d looked away – his lips had gone tight and his face had gone hard and he’d stared off toward the horizon as if he could see through to the Void by force of will.

Now he is looking down. Eyes on the empty space between them. Samuel cannot entirely see the expression on his face, nor read it; he can only see that it is nothing _good._

“Like what?” asks Corvo. It’s the first time he’s spoken in a long while. Samuel is unsettled by the edge in his voice. “Constantly watching?”

“He’s always just sort of…there.”

Corvo nods, once. “He’s only appeared thrice, though,” he confirms.

“Yeah.”

The Lord Protector catches his eye. Corvo has always been a fairly straightforward man, but Samuel is still caught off guard by the _sharpness_ in his gaze. “Thankfully?” he supplies.

Samuel nods, and sees a hint of the tension go out of Corvo’s shoulders. He watches the man peel the glove off his left hand and trace the fingers of his right hand over the design, absently, follow the lines to the center and then draw away and curl both hands into fists. “He hasn’t -”

“No, no.”

“Good.” Corvo sits back, slightly. His lips twitch. “You know, you’ve never asked me about this.” A nod to his hand.

“I can guess. The way the Overseers are running around, I didn’t think it’d be a good thing to know the specifics about.”

A laugh. “You’re right.” Corvo runs both hand through his hair until it stands on end a bit. “You should have told me when he first showed up. I would have _talked_ to him.”

Samuel reaches for the thermos, as ever. “You, er, see him that often?”

“Samuel, he doesn’t let me _sleep_.”

Samuel winces. “Ouch.” He passes Corvo a mug. “It’s not like he’s bad company,” he elaborates (because the Lord Protector looks entirely too grateful for the warmth of a mug between his hands and the slump of his shoulders is _entirely_ too much). “I’m not going to lie that he’s incredibly creepy, especially when he doesn’t actually show up. But, I mean, we talk. He doesn’t seem to want to eat me alive or, er, _use_ me in one of his games or anything, and I suppose that’s the best I can hope for?”

“You have _no idea_.”

“Er.” He watches the man pinch the bridge of his nose. “No, I suppose I don’t.”

There is a space of silence, then. It’s not nearly as tense as the past few minutes have been. Samuel matches Corvo’s expression when the man smirks faintly, eyes on his tea. “You really called him a bratty little kid?”

“I’m surprised he didn’t kill me on the spot.”

“I’m going to ask him about that. I’d love to see the look on his face.”

“You can see it right now,” comes a voice from the prow of the boat. And both of them _jump_.

The Outsider sighs, softly. Reaches over and dabs the flecks of spilled tea from Corvo’s coat with the hem of his sleeve (Corvo does not move, merely gives him a rather resigned-looking glare, and Samuel finds himself looking away for a reason he can’t quite put a finger on). Neither of them say anything as the Outsider settles back on the prow of the boat, feet on the bench below, leaning forward with his hands clasped in his lap. “Hello.”

The silence stretches on.

There is a muscle working in Corvo’s jaw, and he keeps moving as if to say something and then catch himself. It’s gone well past the point of being awkward and the noise of Samuel rummaging around under his seat is _loud_. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t have a third mug.”

“That’s fine,” says the Outsider agreeably.

Corvo seems to rouse himself. He reaches down and comes up with the bottle of whiskey that Samuel also keeps here. Uncorks it. It is, somehow, a very welcome sound. “Yes,” the Lord Protector mutters. “Yes, it is.”

He takes a very, very long drink straight from the neck of the bottle, and passes it to Samuel, who then passes it to the Outsider; and the whiskey is very warm, and this time the Outsider does not refuse, and that is all need be said for a long while.


End file.
